Infinite Loop —

A third dimension: Ars reviews Photoshop CS4 Extended

Adobe has released the CS4 suite of applications just 18 months after CS3 hit …

New tabbed interface: a badly-executed text solution for visual content

I don't like to start a review with my harshest criticism, but I always cover interface changes first, so prepare to be dazzled by the flames. Adobe's Creative Suite 3 brought a lot of changes to the interface in an effort to unify the experience across the company's various applications, and Creative Suite 4 has some new things in store—for better or worse. Users will notice two main differences in the CS4 interface: the Application Bar above the Options Bar, and multiple documents opening as tabs along the top of the sole window:

The tabbed Windows UI in CS4. Click for full size.

The tabbed CS4 Mac UI. Click for full size.

Tabs can be reordered by dragging them within the menu, docked and undocked as separate floating windows, or they can be grouped into tabs within those separate floating windows:

If having a mix of tabbed and floating windows gets confusing, you can consolidate them all into one frame by right clicking a tab.

"I'm
a double chevron, actually."

If you've ever used a tabbed browser, there won't be any surprises about how this all works. Aside from the fact that they're images instead of web pages, the tabs experience is basically Firefox with more finicky dragging. The main appeal of tabs is the ability to drag content between document windows, much like how web links are dragged from one tab to another. Grab a layer and move it onto another tab, and the foreground window changes so that the dragged content can be dropped into the other image—if the tab is visible. If a lot of documents are open, and all can't fit within the space along the tab bar, the standard tab chevron appears at the right.

Since you'll need to compare and work with images side-by-side, the tabbed interface can split the main window into any number of panes—what Adobe refers to as "n-up." Using the Arrange Documents widget in the new Application Bar, you can pick from a number of preset arrangements for n-up, ranging from the old standards to some more creative configurations.

A
horizontally tiled example

Matt's
concerned that my hotel room is too small.

At first glance, this looks like it would be a potentially good way to view multiple documents at once, but I have little positive to say about the new interface. Its usefulness is crippled by its inability to simply fit content to the frame.

The fact that content isn't fit to a frame is a pretty big oversight. On top of that, n-up and document stacking is completely unpredictable. If you want to compare documents, there's no way of knowing what order they will be arranged in.

Beyond the glitchy behavior, which can be addressed in future updates, the limitations of Adobe's tabbed model quickly become apparent when you have more than a few documents open. When you drag onto a document nested under this pop-up, holding your cursor over the right area, the tabs quickly hit a dead end and don't scroll to reveal the documents hidden under the chevron. This leads you to thinking that you've reached the end of your open images.

70%
of the visible portion of that
tab says "close me."

What's worse is that the documents can be hidden at the left with no indicator that you aren't seeing all your open documents. If the window is a particular size, then you get a sliver of tab to click.

That means that you basically have to use the chevron to switch to documents that are listed at the left as well. So in the place of CS3's drop down list, you have another drop down list that you'll probably only reach for after your eyes scan all the documents listed in the tab bar. Remember that this was designed to save you time.

On the practical side, tabs and their text-based navigation are great if your document names are descriptive. But if you're on a deadline, chances are that your images are not meticulously named to reflect their content. At our magazine, we invariably keep our stock bank name so we know what images to buy at production time. So along the tab list, or under the chevron pop up, you've got a list of mostly unhelpful names.

Contrast this against the original tabs that inspired their inclusion in Photoshop.

There's
nothing ambiguous about the naming.

Until Photoshop can rename your images according to their content, this situation isn't going to change. A wedding photographer isn't going to have much fun trying to figure out whether it was _MG_3834.CR2 or _MG_3835.CR2 that had everyone with their eyes open. A list of slice numbers is going to be similarly uninformative to a web developer. It's almost as if some visual scheme is needed where all the images could be temporarily shown as a reasonably-sized proxy but still have a visual label to describe it. Oh wait. I had something like that in Photoshop CS3....